John Sayers' Recording Studio Design Forum Archive

greets everyone!

recently, my band moved from rented space to my house...
basement to be more precise...

so here's the deal...
it's a 3.2m x 2.4m big room... about 2.1m height..
one 3.2m wall is 40cm thick (brick), one 2.4m wall is also 40cm thick+40cm of neighbour's house wall too... (brick everything)
one 3.2 is 20cm thick
and the other 2.4m is 20 also...
ceiling is concrete 30cm...

there's styrofoam on 60% of the room and the door is lame-ly isolated (will do better this week) and the sound volume outside the room is not the issue as much is the LOW freq reverb of the room...

the kick drum is filled with blankets and still when the drummer kicks it, it's a rumble through the room...
how to stop the room from low freq reverb?
this week we'll put on the rest of the styrofoam on the room and i was thinking of eggcrates since it's not a question of sound isolating as much as breaking the flat surface of the walls...

otherwise the room is fine, cymbals doesn't reverb and guitar is natural as long as there's no lower notes, since then that bass reverb is much noticed...

(bassist didn't brought the bas amp to the rehearsal space so no idea how it sounds with bass guitar but if it reverbs on the kick drum (and a bit on the floor tom) so i can imagine what will it happen with the bass amp)

i read about the carpet on the walls but i'm not sure will it stop low freq reverb...

oh yeah, styrofoam is 3cm thick.. on the ceiling there is a air chamber 3cm thick then styrofoam...

help please!

greets from Croatia!

If you really mean Styrofoam, that won't help with anything - styrofoam is typically a white, brittle foam and is closed cell construction. This means that it is air-tight, and won't absorb any sound. It actually can amplify sound in some situations. If you are talking about acoustic foam, it is somewhat better but won't help your bass problems.

Carpet only absorbs high frequencies, and will only make your room sound WORSE and more boomy.

Egg crates are similar to carpet - they have some absorption at a peak of around 6.3 kHz, then another peak around 10 kHz - very uneven, and again ZERO low frequency absorption.

With your small, solid masonry room I can only imagine the bass problems you have - the only practical thing I could recommend is if you can build some panel-type bass traps for the corners - any other type of bass trap takes up almost as much space as your entire room before it will be effective.

Here's a link to plans for the type traps you would need -

http://www.ethanwiner.com/basstrap.html

Any of the other things you mentioned will only make your room sound worse - But placing ethan's traps in your corners, 2 per corner flat against the walls, will help a lot... Steve

thanks for the reply!

i think i will solve the problem with mineral woll since fiberglass won't be easy to find around here and min.woll is cheap so no probs with that....

yep it's styrofoam.. (we got lot of m2 left from some thingies before so we stuffed that on walls, heck i thought anything is better than the naked wall... well at least higher freq. doesn't ring...)

guess i'll go to some diy bass traps in the 4 corners of the room...
dunno what to put on the wall, think it'll be eggcrates, el cheapo and diffusing at least at higher freqencies...

anyways
THANKS ALOT!

this room will be changed a bit when we collect money... we'll bring down the wall and build another one 1m from it so we'll have more space and it's not a carrying wall of the house and it should have been there where we'll build it

i'm thinking about tearing down all this crap of the walls and put mineral wool all over and then close it with gyps (? dunno how it's called in english) panels and then some kind of abosorber/diffusor, prolly carpet...

thanks AGAIN!

i understand now the terms and catches in sound isolating... well at least the basics...
hope it'll help..

i'll report the results soon!!!
bye!